Stop Wasting PPC Clicks and Start Saving $$$ – Part 2

Let’s say we have an ad group that is dedicated to selling something specific like “Gibson Guitars.” We’ve got keywords and targeted ads directed to a targeted landing page dealing directly with guitars that are made by Gibson. And let’s say we’ve got a decent amount of money to work with so we decide to use the broad match term “gibson guitars” in our ad group. Well, with broad match, we will get our keyword matched to all kind of queries, even as simple as “guitars.”

Or how about this one. Let’s say we’re selling batteries for ATVs. If we use the broad match term “atv batteries,” a search engine is likely to match our ad to the search query “batteries” very frequently.

The problem with this is we don’t want our ad for “gibson guitars” to be showing on the query “guitars” do we? Who knows what kind of guitar or what kind of budget this searcher is looking for. We don’t want to pay for the click unless that person is specifically looking for a Gibson. We’d rather send that searcher to a more general landing page where they have the freedom to filter by what they’re looking for. Therefore, we want to keep our ad for this ad group from showing on a term as general as “guitars.”

A searcher who searches for as general a term as “batteries” is most likely looking for double or triple-A’s. So, that’s even a worse situation to have our ads show in. And imagine getting curiosity clicks from those impressions! What a waste of money!

Therefore, we want to make sure that our ads are only showing on queries that include searchers looking for specifically what our ad offers.

Now, of course we don’t want to add the terms “guitars” or “batteries” as negative keywords to our ad groups because then our ads won’t show up on any terms containing these words. So, how do we keep from showing up on the general terms while still showing up on targeted terms with those specific keywords in them? We add the specific phrases that we don’t want our ad to show on to our ad group or campaign as negative EXACT match keywords.

By adding “guitars” or “batteries” as negative exact matches, our ad will not show up on the general queries “guitars” or “batteries,” but will still show up on the queries “gibson guitars” and “atv batteries” like we originally wanted them to. Once again, we’ve eliminated more wasted clicks from the mix. Therefore, we should see our conversion rate and cost per conversion metrics in these ad groups improve as we continue to focus on getting only the most relevant visitors to our website and more intelligently spending our precious PPC budget.

Mike Fleming stays on top of the latest strategies in Paid Search and Web Analytics to make sure every campaign he manages for Pole Position clients brings measurable, profit-maximizing value to their company and their website visitors. Mike enjoys playing, writing and recording music along with playing basketball to get his workout in. He resides in Canton, Ohio with a beautiful, sweet, caring and admirable girl who threw a snowball at him one day…then married him. Read Mike's full bio.

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